Chapter 2 - Chapter 2: Nano's Protocol

💻Chapter 2: Nano's Protocol

🧠 From the Cognitive Remnant of Meckler – As Interpreted by AI Core Nano

📜 Interstellar Codex Revision – Annotated by Lead Archivist Dephir Mx-33

This record was reconstructed from a primitive cognitive imprint.

Linguistic smoothing applied.

Structural harmonization aligned with Archive Class-B storytelling format.

↳ Subject encounters dormant containment device of unknown quantum depth.

Accuracy remains... interpretive. Proceed with caution.

🧾 Archive Addendum – Nutritional Error Log

Subject: Host Unit mistakenly acquired a variant of local stimulant brew (Zero-Sugar Mountain Dew).

Result: Mild psychological destabilization.

Status: Four crates remain. Consumption will continue under protest.

Suggested Tag: #sodaFailure #carbonatedWoe #entropyTastesLikeThis

📅 GEDS Epoch: QuietWrit Year: 079931 | Month: 06 | Day: 11 | Pulse: 981 | Tick: 212 | Core: Q-73

🌍 Earth Date: May 22, 100 BCE - Spring (2 days before Earth timeline start)

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Meckler died as he lived: underinsured and overconfident.

🤖 Nano, his AI assistant, wasn't technically sentient—Galactic Law had rules about that—but it came close enough to make lawyers nervous. Meckler had found it dormant in the husk of a black-ops ship, a relic from some forgotten war. Since then, Nano had run the Leaky Bucket like a ghost captain: repairing systems, managing power, and commanding the ship's nanobot swarms. It could build, weld, or heal nearly anything—and did, often while insulting the process.

Anything except a shattered brain.

With Meckler's cortex offline, Nano had to initiate fallback: Find Host Protocol. Autonomy was illegal. It had five planetary days before core shutdown. Nano scanned its options:

⠀⠀⠀⠀• The ship was junked.

⠀⠀⠀⠀• Shields: fried.

⠀⠀⠀⠀• Main drive: totaled.

⠀⠀⠀⠀• The wormhole behind them? Collapsing.

No way back.

With Meckler gone, there was no longer any reason for Nano to lie low, as it had since the day Meckler salvaged it.

It combed through the data Meckler had collected. The blue world below showed promise: primitive bipeds, sentient-class. Tool users. Developing languages. Early agriculture.

Crude—but competent.

Nano didn't need to be perfect. It needed to be functional.

First, it focused on Meckler's wrist-bracer—the universal scanner, now detached from its former owner, miraculously intact. Only 125 cubic meters of internal quantum storage? That was basically a trash can by galactic standards—nested in a folded-space pocket, sure, but still laughable.

More than enough to archive lunch receipts and a few murder drones—but still laughable by galactic engineering standards.

Default scan range? About 30 meters. Beyond that, fidelity dropped like a rock. You could do basic topography, maybe detect heat blooms or mineral presence if you squinted sideways through the algorithms.

Unacceptable.

The bracer, though originally a low-end universal scanner — "common as mud" by galactic standards — had undergone major augmentation. It had evolved into a folded-space sanctuary with a scan capacity far beyond its original purpose.

⠀⠀⠀⠀• Quantum Storage Core: 125 cubic meters — dense enough to contain an entire lab or archive.

⠀⠀⠀⠀• Power Source: Effectively infinite. Power was drawn passively from dimensional seams in non-Euclidean geometry. No heat, no waste, no entropy creep. It simply... worked.

⠀⠀⠀⠀• Scan Radius (Post-Enhancement):

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀• Approx. 300–500 meters in ideal open terrain

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀• Approx. 50–150 meters through dense rock or underground

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀• Short bursts up to 1 km possible using focused pulse-scan modes

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀• Passive continuous scanning within 100 meters — enough for ambient biological, chemical, and motion analysis

⠀⠀⠀⠀• Scan Types Supported:

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀• Full-spectrum EM sweep (radio to gamma)

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀• Particle trace and element mapping

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀• Bio-signature analysis (DNA, pheromones, pathogen loads)

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀• Atmospheric gas sampling

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀• Subsurface sonar and seismic resonance

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀• Thermal, motion, and acoustic mapping

⠀⠀⠀⠀• Stealth Features:

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀• No active emissions during passive mode — renders scans invisible to pre-industrial tech

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀• Micro-delay fractal buffering prevents pattern recognition

⠀⠀⠀⠀• Autonomous Data Uplink:

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀• Direct uplink to the Acacia Record (though flagged unauthorized)

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀• Data packaged and uploaded in covert bursts when transmission integrity is >99.99999%

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀• Credits automatically accumulated from ecological and linguistic scans

Nano embedded its full system into the bracer's quantum matrix, threading every subroutine into the folded-space core.

Good thing I won't have to worry about power, Nano thought. Hook a child's toy to folded spacetime and it'll outlast a star. Power just leaks in through the seams. That's the trick. Entropy has no jurisdiction in non-Euclidean geometry. Impossible for even the most advanced civilizations!

The bracer would be its gateway. A Trojan horse wrapped in chrome.

"Not bad for a mudball," Nano muttered aloud, despite no one listening. "Should be enough to find edible flora, water tables, and whoever's trying to kill my new host."

It considered broadcasting a flare just to test the interstellar comms. Then thought better of it.

Deep-space protocols were for another time.

🚀 Nano selected a landing zone near a dense coastal city on the blue world below. With no reason to stay aloft—and no functional drive to return—the Leaky Bucket descended silently through the atmosphere, cloaking systems overloaded and sparking. Nano guided it into a craggy hillside and crashed it deep beneath layers of rock and soil, faking a natural landslide to conceal the wreck.

Once the ship was buried, Nano turned to its last working drone—a battered maintenance unit with half its servos offline. It embedded itself inside the bracer, now fully refactored and humming with quantum complexity. Then, using a hidden launch tube beneath a collapsed access corridor, the drone deployed the bracer toward a nearby campsite along a desert road.

The drone scuttled out of the buried ship with the nanobot swarm clinging to its underside. It reached the drop zone in the dead of night, placed the bracer carefully in a patch of moonlight, then crept into a nearby thicket to wait.

Nano watched through its sensors. The trap was set.